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Pastimes : Let’s Talk About Our Feelings about the Let’s Talk About Our -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: average joe who wrote (5150)	3/12/2009 8:55:16 PM
From: Tom Clarke	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 5290

Of course the ancient legends are true. The history of the planet has been turbulent and short - Velikovsky was right! Kennewick Man was a white guy, that's why the Army Corps of Engineers had to bury the site under tons of stone, he was political dynamite. Clinton needed those Indian votes. THE FIRST DARK AGE At some point I will do a short introductory essay; the important point is that sometime in the Bronze Ages, a thriving civilization with writing and the ability to build large walled cities and the beginnings of a market economy -- there were traders who were not merely raiders -- collapsed so thoroughly that it became legendary. The walls of Tiryns were so large and imposing that the people who lived in the region thought they were built by giants: by the Cyclopes, and they were called Cyclopean Walls by people who probably counted the actual builders among their ancestors. Writing was lost and had to be reinvented. Much technology was lost. It is a time that bequeaths us many legends, from the Trojan War to the legends of the House of Atreus, and Pelops, and Theseus, and Minos, Achilles and Odysseus, Talos and the stone god who rose from the sea, Jason and the Argonauts, all of which seem to reflect real events, embellished, of course, but real all the same. It was a time when the Maryannu and the Battle Ax people roamed the land, and the Peoples of the Sea invaded Egypt and came to Palestine where, as Philistines, they gave the region its name and passed into history as giants whose champion was a bronze armored hero named Goliath. In the Bible it is an age in which there was no king in Israel, and each man did as he thought right in his own heart. And so it was through the world. But that Dark Age came after a rich civilization with writing and commerce and technology: what killed that civilization? Theories run from barbarian invasions (the return of the Dorians) to earthquakes, to astronomical disasters, to volcanoes. It may have been all of these. If the issue is settled once and for all, that has happened very recently indeed: it certainly was no more than speculation last year... One note: a Dark Age is not just a period in which people no longer know how to do things. The real key is that people no longer remember that certain things can be done at all. As an example, the 5th Century AD (Dark Age) peasant in France who reaped perhaps 3 bushels for each bushel he sowed was entirely unaware that peasants in Roman times had reaped up to 10 bushels for each bushel sowed, this on the same land and with less work. The 5th Century peasant did not try for much higher yields because the very knowledge that you could do that had been lost. In the First Dark Age the very notion of writing was gone, and just about all of the bureaucratic techniques that made the earlier prosperity was not even legend; it was just lost. Herewith some comments and discussions. jerrypournelle.com